In Conversation with Sir Peter Wanless: Safeguarding in schools and the future of child protection

Sir Peter Wanless is the former CEO of the UK charity the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), which he led from 2013 to 2024. The NSPCC, which raises about £125 million a year, employs around 1,500 people across the UK with about 8,000 volunteers. Through Childline, a 24/7 helpline for any child who has a worry or a concern, the NSPCC offers around 200,000 one-to-one counselling sessions a year as well as a host of web-based resources. 

In addition to raising awareness about child abuse and neglect, and campaigning for the 2023 Online Safety Act, Peter has overseen the expansion of Speak out Stay Safe, a service to help young people in primary school understand the nature of abuse and neglect and what to do if there is a worry or a concern. Over 90% of UK schools choose to access it. 

Peter was appointed Independent Safeguarding Advisor for Nord Anglia Education in January 2025. He reports to its Education Advisory Board, chaired by Lord David Puttnam.

What are you most proud about from your time leading the NSPCC? 

I'm proud that we kept safeguarding, child abuse, and neglect in the public consciousness creating a much clearer kind of awareness and understanding of the nature, the scale and the prevalence of these issues. 

I'm pleased that we've been at the forefront of campaigning for the online world to be as safe for children as the offline world. We don't believe children should be shut away from life. They have rights to enjoy the benefits of childhood, whether or not there's risk associated with childhood. We were at the forefront of campaigning for an Online Safety Act in the UK, placing legal obligations on the people designing digital products and services, to exercise a duty of care to the young people using them.  Finally, we’ve worked to create a near universal presence in UK schools to make it easy for more organisations, young people and families to learn, in an age-appropriate way, about how to stay safe from abuse, in a manner which ought to feel natural and straightforward.

Let’s talk about safeguarding in schools and maybe start with the obvious: why is safeguarding so important?

I think that a safe and happy child is a child who is ready and able to learn and grow. Creating an environment of physical and psychological safety and wellbeing, is good in its own terms, but it's also great for helping young people learn about one another and flourish to achieve their potential. Having regard to safety and wellbeing feels like a necessary precondition for everything else.

How do you see safeguarding changing, and what are some of the challenges for schools right now?

I think there's been increased attention on safeguarding because people have seen things go wrong for children in terrible ways. This has led to a codification of rules, procedures and practices, with associated obligations to be compliant. From a legal point of view, compliance is vital and one can derive some comfort from the existence of rules and people with job descriptions that operate in this space. 

But, a consequence of this can be that people fail to see beyond the rules and a healthy safeguarding culture really does matter. It's the actual experiences that young people are thinking and feeling, and healthy relationships including among staff members and adults in schools that really determine the safety of an environment. 

It’s a big challenge. How do we test and assess that culture? How do we understand and talk to one another and reflect on the healthiness and happiness of relationships in and around schools? And in ensuring adherence to our legal obligations, people are feeling safe and comfortable.

So, it’s a real balancing act to make sure the rules and regulations are in place but also, a culture exists to create safety and dialogue too?

There are some parallels with regulating the internet here. If you create a regime, which is, ‘do this, do that, don't do this, don't do that’ you're constantly reacting to the last problem, and the thing that has already gone wrong. 

If we're serious about the prevention of abuse and neglect, as opposed to picking up the pieces afterwards, then we have to ask ourselves ‘what constitutes the conditions which enable us to exercise a duty of care for young people?’. It is a different sort of conversation which takes us upstream and requires us to listen to one another in a really honest and transparent way. 

This isn’t always straightforward, because, especially in elite organisations with excellent reputations to protect, leaders may not necessarily want to hear or believe in the existence of safeguarding risk. 

How can reputation get in the way of good safeguarding? 

Reputation has a lot to answer for in the history of child safety. Particularly when things have gone wrong because leaders have encouraged a culture of defensiveness and swept under the carpet things they would rather not contemplate for fear of the implications this might have for an institution’s reputation. Making the safety and well-being of kids and promoting an open healthy culture of inquiry as a virtue is admirable.

Why did you take the role of Independent Safeguarding Advisor at Nord Anglia Education? 

I admire what Nord Anglia stands for in its aspirations for its students, and I admire the curiosity of the people who've invited me in to take a look at safeguarding to trigger further conversations in this space. There are individuals I know and respect within the group who I am excited about reconnecting with.   


What would you say a culture of high-quality safeguarding looks like? What would we be seeing if we saw excellent safeguarding in a school?

First of all, there would be policies and procedures in place, readily accessible. There would be someone with clear responsibilities for ensuring these are available, understood and influencing culture. It would be really easy if a young person or a staff member or a parent had a worry or concern to know how to express it and what to do about it, and to be confident that it would be recorded somewhere, and - if necessary - some consequences would happen as a result. 

There would also be a real sense of open dialogue about why safeguarding and wellbeing is important, but also obvious mechanisms for conversations and responses if people did have worries or concerns.